Death Row

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 07:04:00 GMT

Death Row is a film about daily life on Death Row in Texas. When the film was made in March 1979, 114 men were housed in the special death cells of Ellis prison's rows J-21 and J-23. The men spend their time waiting for the State to kill them or fighting as hard as they can to prevent that death from happening. Their hardest job is staying sane.

There is less to do on Death Row than any other kind of prison. Except for four hours a week, the men are constantly locked in small one-man cells. Few outsiders visit the Row, and those who do never stay very long. The Row is the least known of all our prisons. The film is about how men get by on the Row, how they fill the years between fixing of a death sentence by a judge and ultimate resolution in freedom, commutation or death by lethal injection. Some of the condemned men discuss their relationships with their families and attorneys; they describe how they keep from going crazy; they talk about the waiting.

The film depicts the few physical actions that barely break the monotony of life on the Row: food service with trays slid under cell doors, haircuts, domino games in the small day room, chess games on boards suspended between two cells by strips of cloth, manufacture of picture frames from cigarette pack and tobacco wrappers, reading lawbooks, watching television... Other comments on the Row are offered by a medical office, a guard, and a convict porter. The filmmakers had unsupervised access to the Row. No guard or other official was in the cells when they were doing the filming and interviewing. No other documentary film shows this otherwise hidden territory in the American criminal justice system. It would be impossible to make such a film now.

Jackson and Christian did a companion book, also titled Death Row (Beacon, 1980), which will soon be reissued with photographs and a new introduction. The book consists primarily of longer conversations with the men who speak in the fiim. Death Row was funded by grants from the American Film Institute, the Polaroid Foundation, the Playboy Foundation and the Levi Strauss Foundation. The digital restoration was funded by University at Buffalo's Baldy Center for Law and Society and Samuel P. Capen Chair in American Culture.

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Out of Order

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 13:51:00 GMT

Out of Order
Buy Now: $320.00

In Out of Order, six former Catholic nuns tell why they entered and why they left religious life. The women (filmmaker Diane Christian is one of them) describe their years in the convent and their return to the secular world.

The former nuns talk about single life and marriage (three are married, one to a former priest), about the changed place of religion in their lives, about sex roles, about institutional supports and burdens, about work. Three of the women teach - one at a state university, one in an inner city grammar school, one at a suburban high school. One woman is an artist, one an insurance agent, one a private investor. The film shows them at work and at home in New York, Massachusetts, Texas and Maryland.

Out of Order offers unique insight into female socialization and identity in modern America by probing ideals and realities of womanhood, sex, work and service from an unknown and unusual perspective.

Primary funding for Out of Order was provided by a production grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The digital restoration was funded by University at Buffalo's Samuel P. Capen Chair in American Culture.

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Documentary Educational Resources - Filmmaker / Jackson, Bruce / All Films

Death Row

Out of Order